1 The Director of Photography – an overview

58 Practical Cinematography
The company’s zoom lenses for 16 mm photography are of high
quality and have now gone through several generations. I have a particular
affection for the original 10–100 mm T3 or T3.1 lens. If you can
find one in good condition it is still a very usable lens much, and wisely,
favoured by many film schools.
Zeiss now produce high-speed lenses for both 16 mm and 35 mm
photography, and they are all of the highest quality with some very
interesting variants, including lenses that can be used for normal photography
but will focus extraordinarily close.
Cooke lenses (S4 range)
Soon after the introduction of Panavision’s Primo lenses, which, of
course, you could only hire if you were getting your camera equipment
from Panavision, a number of independent camera rental houses realized
that they were slightly wrong-footed as they had nothing to offer
which might compete with the Primos. The Zeiss super speeds were
good but, by comparison, an older generation of computation. So they
got together and started asking around as to who might produce
something to give them an interesting range to market.
Cooke Lenses had already embarked on the early work of a new
range of prime lenses. Here was a wonderful opportunity. Cooke Lenses
had, for a couple of generations, been revered for very fine lenses with a
certain ‘look’. This look is hard to describe and impossible to define in
any technical or scientific way. It is an emotional thing: words like
romantic, gentle, deep shadows, kind to the artists all come to mind.
Nevertheless, Cooke lenses have always had very good definition.
Cooke have, over the years prior to the introduction of the S4 range,
produced three important series of prime lenses. The Series 1 range
were innovative in their time but now hopelessly out of date. Their
Series 2 are famed worldwide. Perceived wisdom, which I agree with,
says that a set of Series 2 lenses, with the 18 mm replaced by a Series 3
lens that is superior to the Series 2, may well have been the ultimate
set of prime lenses of that era. I have shot two pictures with exactly
this set (admittedly they had all been recoated and set in new housings
by Century Precision Optics) and received much praise for the results.
As a cinematographer, what else does one choose a set of lenses for?
Both pictures were, of course, period pieces, where the lenses helped
me create the feeling of the times.
Having now tried the Cooke S4 range, I am very impressed. Somehow
they have produced an utterly modern set of lenses but have
retained the ‘Cooke look’.
Cooke have also brought the range very much up to date as regards
the mechanical engineering. Having taken note of a modern focus
puller’s needs, they have completely dispensed with the conventional
scroll or screw-thread method of racking the lens in and out to focus it
and, borrowing design thoughts from their zoom lenses, used cams and
cam followers to give a much more linear feel to the focusing scale,
together with greater smoothness. This has enabled them to engrave a
very user-friendly focus scale, giving focus pullers much greater control
over their craft.
For many cinematographers a huge advantage of the Cooke S4
primes is that they match to extraordinary close tolerances the colour